


i wanna make magic

by actualmuseofspace



Category: Fame: The Musical - Margoshes/Levy/Fernandez
Genre: (kind of), F/F, F/M, Healthy Relationships, Math and Science Metaphors, Multi, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Polyamory, movies - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-15
Updated: 2019-01-15
Packaged: 2019-10-10 18:46:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,801
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17431499
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/actualmuseofspace/pseuds/actualmuseofspace
Summary: Nick knows exactly who he wants to be. He just has to get there.--Alternatively, Serena and Goody try to just be high schoolers.





	i wanna make magic

“I wanna make magic,” Nick says.

“Who’s stopping you?” asks Serena.

Nick doesn't respond because there is no response that wins.

—

Serena comes over to watch movies, sliding so easily into his arms he doesn’t know what to say about it. If his parents come into the basement, they don’t say anything about the teenage girl curled against their son. If they didn’t say anything about Goody, about the teenage boy, they wouldn’t say something know. It’s why they have their movie night at his house, because they can eat popcorn and throw it at the TV without anyone wondering why they don’t just kiss already.

When they go to Serena's house, he feels out of place and too quiet. Serena tells him he needs to learn to speak up even when he's not on stage. When she talks to her parents, it's with a flippant respect Nick doesn't think he could mimic unless he was on stage, and even then, not quite right.

When they go to Serena's house, it feels too loud and too small and too much all at the same time. Nick thinks to his house, with its steady silence like fast falling snow or the background summer buzz of heat and cicadas, and he doesn't miss it, not quite, but he doesn't know how to be around younger siblings and parents who ask about their days and dinners that are everyone at the table and no one allowed to take it upstairs.

Whether or not Serena thinks about it the way Nick does, they spend their afternoons at Nick's house. They eat pizza, but eventually, Nick's mother makes them eat what she cooks for dinner. They watch movies, but eventually, they do their homework first.

"It's not like," Serena remarks, staring at the piles of DVDs Nick has accumulated over years and years of missed trips to the movie theatre, "Either of us was ever in it for the  _ movies _ ."

—

“I wanna make magic,” Nick says.

“That mean you’re gonna fuck me any time soon?” asks Goody.

Nick rolls his eyes. "Not everything, you know, has to be so crude."

Goody shakes his head. "I wasn't thinking about being crude. I was thinking we could go nice and slow and gentle. You could put on one of the mixtapes Serena keeps making that you keep not listening to."

"Is that what this is about?"

"This isn't about anything except the shame of an opportunity you're lacking." Goody tugs Nick's arm, and Nick can't help but fall back onto the couch. "Stop thinking so big. Start thinking, like, us-sized."

"We’re bigger than this moment, Goody.”

“We don’t have to be, Nick. We can be us sized. You and I and Serena. You don’t always have to put on the score for the latest hit musical. Sometimes we can turn on the recordings from the radio, with her siblings' voices fading in.”

“Is that seriously what’s on there?” For a beat, Nick thinks he sees a flicker of a shadowy emotion, dark red and purple, but Goody's face is relaxed and calm.

“Yeah, please tell me you can turn on the score for Les Miserables. I’d take literally anything over those.”

“Yeah, sure.” Nick laughs and shifts his weight on Goody. “But I promise I’ll listen at some point, okay?”

“That’s it. Now let’s make some magic, eh?”

\--

At school, like electrons, their behaviour is different because they are observed. It's impossible to avoid.

Serena and Nick will always be scene partners, and Goody will always be in the background, playing the bass line to their fairytale romance.

It's unavoidable.

The momentum and position of an electron make up the two pieces of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. The more you know about one, the less the other. (It is both a property of quantum mechanics and a property of how each property is measured. Like a brain studying a brain, there is no smaller unit than an electron to see with.)

Nick will always be Nick Piazza, unavoidable, entirely gay. Clearly, obviously. Serena and Nick will always be everyone's favourite couple, even though everyone knows that they'll never really happen. Serena will always be hopelessly in love, too hopelessly to see that he'll never pine after her. They are known momentums, but they never know where they stand on their feet.

Goody will always be not quite noticed unless Nick and Serena remember to point him out. If they are electrons, then Nick and Serena are a known position and Goody is a known velocity. They may not know where he is going, but they know how fast he's moving.

("Sometimes fast, sometimes slow," he says when Nick tells him this metaphor. "Whatever makes you scream." Nick's face resembles a tomato right before it splits, spluttering but not able to speak. "Or, yes, that's good too. Whatever works.")

Electrons behave differently when they are observed. Photons will go through two slits at once, entangled and interfering with each other, so as long as nothing is watching them do so. When they are watched, they freeze, embarrassed by their proximity, and go through one, in neat, orderly lines. The world depends on their entanglement, but it can never see it.

When Nick and Serena call attention to Goody, when they cue the follow spots on the pit from their bows on center stage, Goody only stays there long enough to be seen, before he's ducking underneath the stage extension and trying to get out of the light as soon as he can, and then, no one can find him.

At school, like electrons, they cannot change their momentum, so their positions are changed. Nick knows where he is going, and so the world collapses to fill the spaces they leave.

\--

"I wanna make magic," Nick says, his voice carrying into the dark, full air of the empty auditorium. "I wanna do it all from a to z."

Serena doesn't quite laugh, but the sound she makes could be considered that. She's doing her homework in the front row, the contents of her backpack making homes in all the vacant seats.

"I mean it, Serena. I'm going to do it."

"You do say that." She makes a motion with her head that's not quite a nod and not quite a shake. "But I don't think there's enough time in your life to do it all."

Nick sighs. "That's not the point."

"I know."

—

Sometimes they all cram into Nick’s house to watch movies. Carmen claims an entire chair, even if there's space for three of her in Nick's father's wearing armchair, Schlomo picks the one closest to her like no one notices he does this every time. Goody and Lambchops sit next to each other, sitting up too straight. Serena still curls into Nick, leaving gaps between their hands. That’s why they do this at Nick’s house. Because his parents see them and think, “Thank God they’re kids.”

(Instead of, Nick sometimes reflects, Carmen's mother who always looks at Carmen like, "Mija, why did you bring home so many hungry hearts?" or Serena's father who shakes Nick's hand and manages to make Nick feel welcome even if they both know Nick's been far too intimate with his daughter or Grace's mother who doesn't understand an ounce of what they do but always buys them pizza and says, "If you ever need to talk, Nick, don't even worry about my Grace, I'm happy to give you someone who's not your parents, hear?")

They don’t care what the movie is, because they rarely watch it. It’s not about the movie. It’s about their closing eyes and weakly thrown popcorn. It’s about how it always becomes a sleepover, complete with sleeping bags all with heads pointed to the center so they can keep each other up late when they're whispering, and his parents say, “Thank God they’re kids.”

—

“I wanna make magic,” Nick says, and no one responds because everyone has their eyes on him. “I wanna do it all from a to z.”

He can hear Goody telling him, “As long as m is me and s is Serena.”

Serena moves to hit Goody, somewhere between, "Don't be so crude," and "Don't be so crude," and "I can't share Nick with anyone more than you."

Nick doesn't laugh, but if his smile twitches up at the edges, that's no one's business but his.

—

No one has ever been in his room. He prefers it that way. Then again, even his parents have to draw a line somewhere. So Serena drags him upstairs, traces his face with her fingers, and calls him a wonder. Nick closes his eyes and does his best to believe her as she holds his face and kisses him as deep as she can manage.

Alone, they are like koi in a pond. Their size is limited to their surroundings. Nick’s room is intimate. They can’t help but be drawn together.

The kinetic molecular theory makes two assumptions to yield the ideal gas law.

The first, that gases have no volume.

The second, that gases do not interact.

Nick and Serena are just as transient as any gas. They make up little substance. Under ideal conditions, they pass by each other without contact.

No gas is ideal.

Under high pressure, gases take up more space compared to their containers. The volume of the gas itself no longer negligible.

Under the pressure of high school, Nick and Serena take up space in each other. Serena makes space in his bedroom, even if it makes Nick bristle so slightly. Nick finds himself slowly dragged into Serena’s family. He doesn’t mean to. But it happens.

Under low temperature, gases can no longer overcome their interactions. They interact with themselves more and more compared to the walls of their container.

As winter comes, Serena and Nick stand closer together. Her hands are always cold because she never remembers her gloves. He takes them in his, his thumbs worrying over her knuckles, and he crumbles his resolve, finds himself pressing gentle kisses against her chilled cheek.

The ideal gas law overestimates volume and underestimates pressure. (This is because of the assumptions it makes. It cannot overestimate both because volume and pressure are inversely proportional.) Nick constantly underestimates intimacy. He doesn’t know what he overestimates to make up for it. Serena constantly overestimates proximity. She assumes Nick must underestimate something to make up for it. Serena has always been the better chemistry student.

—

“I wanna make magic,” Nick says.

“You always say that,” says Goody.

“Anyway, we’re not in your fantasy land. Let us be magic for a while.”

“Alright,” he says, and Serena curls up with her head against his collarbone, and Goody drapes his legs across them, and it’s magic enough for now.

**Author's Note:**

> And thus ends my collection of Fame fics. If you liked this, you might also like "the moon and the sun," another Fame fic by me.  
> As always, if you notice any errors (of the grammatical or scientific kind), feel free to let me know.  
> Next thing I have to publish is "before the dragons," a Harry Potter piece in the same universe as "in ravenclaw someone is always awake," which will be up late February.


End file.
